"Fleet Street" will be broadcast on U.S. cable channel Starz and will follow the competitive landscape of tabloid publications in 1970s London, Starz said in a statement on Wednesday.

"It was the dawn of the celebrity era, in all its gruesome detail - a revolution that changed pop culture, and the relationship between the press and politicians, royals, and stars," Morgan said in a statement.

The series "will chronicle the rise of tabloid journalism, the sexual revolution and class warfare, all seen through the eyes of an American journalist," the statement added.

"Fleet Street" is currently in development and does not have a release date. It will consist of eight to 13 hour-long episodes.

Morgan, 48, rose to fame as the youngest national newspaper editor in 1994 when he was appointed to lead Rupert Murdoch's now defunct News of the World tabloid.

He became editor of the Daily Mirror in 1995 but was fired in 2004 after the newspaper published false photographs of Iraqi prisoners apparently being abused by British soldiers.

Morgan moved into television, gaining fame as a judge on Simon Cowell's competition shows "Britain's Got Talent" and its U.S. version "America's Got Talent."

In 2011, Morgan took over from veteran host Larry King and launched the CNN talk show "Piers Morgan Live."

(Reporting by Piya Sinha-Roy; Editing by Jill Serjeant and Eric Walsh)

As a beauty lover’s cult brand,are a natural fit among the high quality designer products that Beauty Encounter already has to offer.Highly rated and loved by makeup artists, this brand is well known for providing professional quality products with youthful fun and is also very inexpensive.With more than 384 SKUs and best selling products, makeup pros can find the full line of professional NYX Cosmetics, through the premier online super-boutique.

All of the top NYX Cosmetics products are being offered at the Beauty Encounter website, including the exceptionally popular , the 2012 Allure award-winning Matte Bronzer, the NYX Wonder Pencil, the Soft Matte Lip Cream, and the Curve Eyeliner from the fall 2012 Glam Collection (as seen featured in Life & Style Magazine and the NY Times, among others).

Among the other highly popular designer brands that are available at BeautyEncounter.com are , Obagi, Chanel, and Gucci.There are more than 40,000 products in the company inventory, from over 1,100 different brands, each of which is 100 percent authentic.The company deals only with the most highly trusted suppliers and venders who purchase their product directly from the distributor or manufacturer.Every product is carefully inspected for quality and to ensure that it is genuine.

Beauty Encounter has been providing genuine, high quality designer products since 1999 as both a retailer and wholesaler. For nearly a decade and a half, it has made every effort to ensure that its customers can purchase all their favorite designer, mass, and salon quality beauty products and cosmetics with confidence and at competitive prices.As one of the largest online beauty retailers, it boasts a strong and ever-growing loyal customer base made up of industry professionals and beauty mavens, alike.

For more information about the addition of NYC Cosmetics to the Beauty Encounter offerings, visit , or to learn about the full range of available genuine high quality designer beauty products, visit the official company website at: .

Anne SouvannasengBeauty Encounter(888) 844-7730

U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said federal officials determined the legislation gave the FAA enough flexibility to keep funding the towers, which had been scheduled to be shut down in June to save money.

"This victory is thanks to a bipartisan coalition of senators and congressmen and women who came together to demonstrate that there are more responsible ways to cut spending than by compromising safety," Senator Jerry Moran, a Kansas Republican, said in a statement welcoming the decision.

The White House announced plans for both the furloughs and the tower closures earlier this year to meet automatic spending cuts required by Congress under the so-called sequestration law aimed at reducing the U.S. budget deficit.

Congress sprang into action after the rolling FAA furloughs caused delays at major airports across the United States.

At the time, Moran insisted the legislation also contained flexibility for FAA to transfer funds to keep the control towers open, but Transportation Department officials said they needed to review it before making a decision.

Most of the United States' 5,000 publicly used airports don't have air traffic control towers.

In addition to 292 operated by the FAA, another 251 are operated by three private companies in public-private partnership called the FAA Contract Tower Program.

The FAA originally planned to shut down 189 of the contract towers. It trimmed the list to 149 in response to pressure from lawmakers who said the closures would hurt local economies and jeopardize safety.

The targeted towers all had fewer than 150,000 takeoffs and landings or 10,000 commercial flights per year. They cater to corporate jets and individuals with private planes. Many also house flight schools, serve as hubs for smaller airlines or provide relief capacity for larger airports nearby.

The FAA will also use new funding flexibility to shift $10 million toward reducing cuts and delays in moving to a new satellite-based air traffic control program, LaHood said.

Another $11 million will be used to partially restore support of infrastructure in the national airspace system.

(Reporting by Doug Palmer, Andrea Shalal-Esa and Anna Louie Sussman; Editing by Vicki Allen and Philip Barbara)

The major college football conference commissioners named the new postseason system that starts in 2014 on Tuesday, the first of three days of meetings at a resort hotel in the Rose Bowl's backyard.

Out with the Bowl Championship Series and in with the College Football Playoff.

"I don't think you can ever go too wrong calling something what it is," Pac-12 Commissioner Larry Scott said. "Things that make sense tend to stand the test of time."

Next on the agenda is to pick three more bowls for the six-bowl semifinal rotation the Rose, Orange and Sugar are already in and where the first championship game will be held on Jan. 12, 2015. That comes Wednesday.

Four bowls have bid to be part of the rotation. The clear front-runners are the Cotton, Chick-fil-A and Fiesta. The Holiday Bowl in San Diego also put in a bid, but even its organizers acknowledged they are a long shot at best.

The finalists to host the first championship game are Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas, the billion dollar home of the NFL team and the Cotton Bowl, and Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Fla., home of the NFL's Buccaneers and the Outback Bowl.

Arlington is the favorite, but the competition has been serious.

"I'm glad it has," Big 12 Commissioner Bob Bowlsby said Tuesday. "I think it will give us a better outcome."

Even before an official announcement about the name was made on Tuesday, the website www.collegefootballplayoff.com was up and running and allowing fans to vote on a new logo. And there also was a Twitter handle: (at)cfbplayoff.

"It's really simple. It gets right to the point," BCS executive director Bill Hancock, who will hold the same position in the playoff system, said at a short news conference.

"Nothing cute. Nothing fancy. We decided it would be best to call it what it is."

Premiere Sports Management in Overland Park, Kan., was hired to help come up with a name and brand the new system. A committee of commissioners handled the naming of the new system, and Hancock said they ran through "in the neighborhood of three dozen" names.

Scott said: "We're clearly trying to make a clear break from the BCS."

The new postseason format will create two national semifinals to be played New Year's Eve or New Year's Day, with the winners advancing. The six bowls in the playoff rotation will host marquee, BCS-type games on New Year's Eve or New Year's Day during the seasons they do not host a semifinal.

The first semifinals will be played at the Rose and Sugar bowls on Jan. 1, 2015.

Also on the agenda this week for the commissioners will be the composition of the selection committee that will set the field for the playoff. They have said they would like the committee to be similar to the one that picks the teams for the NCAA basketball tournament, made up of conference commissioners and athletic directors.

Bowlsby said he expected both current and former administrators to have a spot on the committee.

"The hardest thing is making sure we're arming whoever is on the committee with the tools that it takes to differentiate among closely proximal teams," Bowlsby said. "You have to have some metrics available to differentiate between three, four, five, six and seven.

"You can't just say we like blue uniforms and not gold uniforms. You've got to arm the committee with the tools that it takes to do their job."

(Reuters) - Acquiring Sprint Nextel is so important to Dish Network Corp founder and Chairman Charlie Ergen that he said on Thursday he may have to put the satellite TV company up for sale unless it prevails in its bidding war for Sprint with Japan's SoftBank Corp.

Ergen also proposed a number of other possible outcomes on Dish's quarterly conference call. He said he could take on a bidding partner or sell some non-core Dish assets to pay down debt if a bidding war with SoftBank becomes too pricey.

Dish made a $25.5 billion counter bid last month for Sprint, facing off against SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son, who entered an agreement in October to pay $20.1 billion for 70 percent of Sprint.

"If we're unsuccessful with Sprint, obviously we have a lot of options." Ergen told analysts. "It could include selling spectrum. It could include selling the whole company. It could include partnering with somebody else in the wireless business."

Ergen did not say who could partner with Dish if it needed more financing than it could handle alone to win the asset.

In response to Son's warning to Sprint shareholders that a Dish deal would load down Sprint with too much debt, Ergen argued that he could reduce debt leverage in a few years or even sell assets if it needed to pay back debt sooner.

Dish is looking to expand into the wireless services as growth slows in its satellite TV business.

Ergen's conference call came after Dish reported its quarterly earnings. In the first quarter, it added a net 36,000 subscribers, down from 104,000 a year earlier. Analysts had expected 68,000, according to StreetAccount.

Dish's offer for Sprint is part of Chairman Charlie Ergen's strategy to diversify Dish beyond its core pay-TV business, which faces tough competition from cable, telecom and internet video providers.

Net profit fell to $215.6 million, or 47 cents per share, in the first-quarter from $360.3 million, or 80 cents per share, a year earlier.

Revenue dropped marginally to $3.56 billion, mainly due to a weak performance of its Blockbuster video rental business, which Dish bought in a bankruptcy auction in 2011.

Blockbuster revenue fell 46 percent to $180.3 million, mainly because Dish sold the British unit of the video rental company to private equity firm Gordon Brothers Europe.

Analysts on average had expected earnings of 53 cents per share on revenue of $3.61 billion, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

Shares of the Englewood, Colorado-based company closed at $39.61 on the Nasdaq on Wednesday.

(Reporting By Sinead Carew and Liana B. Baker. Additional reporting by Lehar Maan in Bangalore; Editing by Don Sebastian)

The National Association of Realtors said Tuesday that sales reached 4.65 million last year. That's up 9.2 percent from 2011 and the most since 2007. Sales are still below the roughly 5.5 million that are consistent with a healthy market.

Sales dipped in December to a pace of 4.94 million, down from 4.99 million in November. November's figure was revised lower, but was still the highest in three years.

The supply of available homes is shrinking as sales rise. That's pushing up prices. The inventory of homes for sale dropped to 1.82 million in December, the lowest in 12 years.

Still, the housing market is recovering and most analysts expect that should continue this year.

Steady hiring, record-low mortgage rates and a tight supply of new and previously occupied homes available for sale have helped boost sales and prices in most markets.

A measure of U.S. home prices rose 7.4 percent annually in November, real estate data provider CoreLogic said last week.That's the biggest annual increase since 2006, when the housing bubble began to burst. CoreLogic forecasts that home prices will rise 6 percent nationally this year.

Rising demand for homes has persuaded builders to step up construction, which adds to economic growth and hiring.

U.S. builders started work on homes in December at the fastest pace in 4 years, the government said last week. And builders finished 2012 as their best year for residential construction since the early stages of the housing crisis.

The gains in home building helped boost construction hiring in December by 30,000 jobs the most in 15 months.

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) - A trio of Hollywood veterans are teaming up to reinvent 1950s B-movies from the American International Pictures library.

Producer Lou Arkoff, writer-producer Jeff Katz and ICM alum Hal Sadoff have joined forces on the venture, which will reimagine the AIP catalog as a single shared movie universe that will feature a recurring cast of antiheroes, monsters and bad girls.

The effort will extend to licensing, gaming, online media and other ancillaries.

The trio will initially remake 10 of the 25 titles in the Arkoff/Nicholson library of AIP-produced genre films, including "Girls in Prison," "Viking Women & the Sea Serpent," "The Brain Easters," "She-Creature," "Teenage Caveman," "Runaway Daughters," "The Undead," "War of the Colossal Beast," "Cool and the Crazy" and "Day the World Ended."

The 10 films set in the new AIP universe, all of which were written by Katz, will be shot together, back-to-back, with production starting in the fall.

Founded in 1954 by Arkoff's father, Samuel Z. Arkoff, and James H. Nicholson, AIP was known for releasing low-budget indie movies for a teenage audience, including the early films of director Roger Corman and the "Beach Party" series with Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello.

In 1979, AIP merged with Filmways, which was later folded into Orion Pictures. The rest of the company's library is owned by MGM.

Arkoff previously produced remake of AIP titles for Showtime's "Rebel Highway" series as well as a series of AIP creature titles for HBO/Cinemax in the early 2000s with Stan Winston.

Katz, who has written comic books for DC Comics and Top Cow, previously worked as a studio executive on genre films such as "Shoot 'Em Up," "Freddy vs. Jason" and "Snakes on a Plane."

"The timing is perfect to reinvent these great titles," said Sadoff, who was most recently the head of ICM's international and independent film group. "The independent film marketplace has never been stronger, with traditional along with new and exciting distribution platforms for consumers to access content. We will be working with established and cutting edge talent to create films that are fun and commercial, while maintaining the integrity of the classic AIP titles."

Total consumer installment credit rose by $7.97 billion to $2.81 trillion. That was the smallest increase since July. Economists polled by Reuters had expected consumer credit to rise a solid $16.00 billion in March.

Revolving credit, which mostly measures credit-card use, fell $1.71 billion after rising $453 million in February.

Nonrevolving credit, which includes auto loans as well as student loans made by the government, rose $9.68 billion in March. That followed an $18.18 billion increase in February.

(Reporting by Lucia Mutikani; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)

Speaking on CNBC television, Buffett said the economy is benefiting from improvement in areas that had not previously performed well, particularly homebuilding.

He also said the improved economy is helping create increased traffic for NetJets, Berkshire's private plane unit.

"The economy is moving forward, but at a slow pace," he said. "Demand has come back, but slowly."

Buffett said low benchmark interest rates, including overnight rates that have been effectively zero since late 2008, can help stimulate demand.

"When interest rates are low, and people expect them to stay low for a while, it pushes up the value of all other assets," he said. "Interest rates act like gravity for all other asset prices."

Buffett called Bernanke "a gutsy guy" who has "done very, very well in terms of what he has done for the United States."

Last week, the Fed said it will continue to buy $85 billion of bonds per month to keep interest rates low and spur growth, and said it will step up purchases if needed.

The economy grew at a 2.5 percent annualized rate in the first quarter.

Buffett spoke on CNBC after Berkshire's annual shareholders meeting over the weekend in Omaha, Nebraska.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Jeffrey Benkoe)

(Reuters) - Chinese e-commerce firm Alibaba Group acquired an 18 percent stake in web portal Sina Corp's microblogging service Weibo in its first big move into selling advertising on China's highly competitive social networks.

Sina's U.S.-listed shares surged 21 percent to $60.81 in early trading, before easing back to $56.90.

The $586 million deal, which values Weibo at over $3 billion, will provide more advertising revenue to Weibo as Sina tries to monetize the service and increase its lead over rival Tencent Holdings' social messaging product, WeChat.

The deal, seen by analysts as generously priced, should drive more web traffic to Alibaba's Taobao Marketplace, China's largest e-commerce website with a consumer focus.

Alibaba is tipped to go public within the next year.

Weibo, China's version of Twitter, has grown at a fast clip since its launch in 2009 and has gained from the blockage of Twitter by the Chinese government.

More than 500 million Chinese use Weibo to opine on everything from Korean soap operas to China's latest political intrigue.

"(The stake purchase) is as an endorsement from Alibaba ... of the value of Sina's Weibo platform," Morningstar analyst Dan Su said.

"This indicates the tremendous value of the data that is present on the Weibo platform that can be mined for a lot of activities, such as ecommerce."

Unlisted Alibaba, controlled by charismatic Chinese internet entrepreneur Jack Ma, also runs Alibaba.com, the country's largest business-to-business commerce platform, and Alipay, a PayPal-like online payment platform.

Ma, one of China's best known corporate leaders, reckoned to be worth $3.4 billion by Forbes late last year, built his e-commerce empire from scratch.

He plans to step down as CEO on May 10 and become executive chairman. Alibaba is likely to go public in a listing in Hong Kong that could value the company at about $100 billion, according to industry sources.

Alibaba has kept mum about its IPO plans, but its listing will likely be a windfall for Yahoo Inc, which owns nearly a quarter of the company.

GENEROUS FOR SINA

Some analysts, who had valued Weibo between $600 million and $2.5 billion, said the deal offered by Alibaba was generous.

"We believe this deal is very positive for Sina. It instantly gives pricing to Sina Weibo with a valuation of $3.26 billion; the per share base could be $48," T.H. Capital Research analyst Tian Hou said.

"Sina's resource consolidation with Alibaba Group, which has a huge dominant position in China's e-commerce, can escalate Weibo's development," she said.

Sina, which makes most of its revenue from online advertising both on its website and Weibo, has had investors worried as the growth rate of Chinese online advertising slows. Its shares have slipped 15 percent in the last 12 months.

Maxim Group analyst Echo He said the Alibaba deal would help Sina in the longer term, but giving Sina cash would not solve its problems and its valuation would still depend on its own profitability.

This is not the first time Sina has tied up with a major Chinese company to seek new streams of revenue.

Sina allied with Baidu Inc last year, integrating Baidu search in its mobile website, while Baidu said its cloud initiative would come with the Weibo app preinstalled.

The analysts said Sina could potentially team up with many other companies, while Morningstar's Su said the deal ruled out any near-term plans for another such major alliance.

Sina has also granted Alibaba the option to increase its stake in Weibo to 30 percent within a stipulated time, which it did not specify.

The alliance is expected to generate about $380 million in advertising and social commerce services revenue for Weibo over the next three years, Sina said in a statement.

(Additional reporting by Supantha Mukherjee; Editing by Saumyadeb Chakrabarty)